Noir Nook: Ripped from the Headlines
Shadow of a Doubt (1943)
If you know your Alfred Hitchcock, you might be aware that of all the movies he directed between 1925 and 1976, he considered his favorite to be Shadow of a Doubt (1943), starring Teresa Wright and Joseph Cotten. What you might not know is that the murderer at the center of the film was inspired by real-life serial killer Earle (some spell it “Earl”) Nelson, who embarked on a crime spree during the 1920s that started in Philadelphia and wound up in Winnipeg, Canada.
Shadow of a Doubt focuses on Charlotte “Charlie” Newton (Wright), whose humdrum life gets more of a jolt that she bargained for in the form of her beloved uncle and namesake, Charles (Cotten). Charlie is delighted when her relative pays an unexpected visit to her hometown of Santa Rosa, California, and she’s not alone – his charms have the town’s female population clinging to him like Saran Wrap to a lemon meringue pie. Still, before long, red flags start popping up and swiping at Charles’s stellar image, beginning with the ruby ring he gives to Charlie – which bears someone else’s initials. As the days pass and the flags further unfurl, Charlie is forced to admit that there’s far more to her uncle than meets the eye – like, a penchant for MURDER.
And speaking of murder, the inspiration for the deadly Uncle Charles – Earle Nelson – kicked off his career in crime in the fall of 1925, when he was almost 30 years old; in the span of less than a month, he left the bodies of three middle-aged women in his wake. From Philadelphia, Nelson worked his way from coast to coast, attacking and killing a total of 24 women and one child in Chicago, San Francisco, Baltimore, Oakland, and Buffalo before making his way to Canada, where he was finally captured nearly two years later.
The Hitchcock film fleshes out the story of Charles Newton to include his relationships with his niece, his sister (Patricia Collinge), and other family members; one of the added storylines focuses on Charlie’s father (Henry Travers) and his best friend (Hume Cronyn, in his screen debut), who wile away their hours together by pondering the perfect murder. But Charles Newton and his real-life counterpart have several important qualities in common. First off, when Earle Nelson was 10 years old, he ran into a streetcar while riding his bicycle – the accident left him with a hole in his temple, and he was unconscious for six days. Afterwards, he suffered from frequent headaches and memory lapses, and displayed odd behaviors, like talking to invisible people and impulsively quoting verses from the Bible. Nelson’s screen counterpart was involved in a similar accident, crashing into a streetcar while on his bicycle and fracturing his skull. His sister, Emma, recalled that before the accident, Charles was a quiet boy with an affinity for books, but after his lengthy recovery, he became boisterous and full of mischief: “He didn’t do much reading after that, let me tell you,” Emma said.
Another significant likeness between Earle Nelson and Charles Newton focuses on their murderous modus operandi. Nelson zeroed in on houses that displayed a “Rooms for Rent” sign and carried out his deadly deeds after gaining access as a potential tenant. And although Newton spends most of the movie with his family in Santa Rosa, the establishing shot in his first scene shows that he is residing in a house that rents rooms. Finally, both Nelson and Newton had a nickname based on their criminal deeds; Nelson was known as “The Gorilla Strangler” (among others), and Newton was “The Merry Widow Killer.”
Shadow of a Doubt started from a nine-page treatment called “Uncle Charlie,” by novelist Gordon McDonell. The idea first came to McDonnell when his car broke down near the small town of Hanford, California, during a vacation to the Sierra Nevada mountains. McDonnell’s wife, Margaret – who worked as head of the story department for producer David O. Selznick – told Hitchcock about her husband’s idea, and McDonnell pitched it to the director over lunch at the famed Brown Derby restaurant. After McDonnell submitted his treatment to Hitchcock, the director reached out to Thornton Wilder – Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Our Town – and he and Hitchcock worked on scouting locations and building the story into a screenplay. Other collaborators on the film’s script were Hitchcock’s wife, Alma Reville; and Sally Benson, perhaps best known for writing the young adult book, Junior Miss.
Incidentally, both Earle Nelson and Charles Newton met with an untimely end – Nelson was hanged after he was found guilty by a jury that deliberated for less than an hour. And Uncle Charlie . . .
Well – in case you haven’t seen the movie, I’ll leave you to discover Uncle Charlie’s demise on your own.
Stay tuned for my next look at a film noir Ripped from the Headlines!
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– Karen Burroughs Hannsberry for Classic Movie Hub
You can read all of Karen’s Noir Nook articles here.
Karen Burroughs Hannsberry is the author of the Shadows and Satin blog, which focuses on movies and performers from the film noir and pre-Code eras, and the editor-in-chief of The Dark Pages, a bimonthly newsletter devoted to all things film noir. Karen is also the author of two books on film noir – Femme Noir: The Bad Girls of Film and Bad Boys: The Actors of Film Noir. You can follow Karen on Twitter at @TheDarkPages.
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